Have you ever sat with a friend and listened to her bitch about her
life and how fucking shitty it is and then listen to her kind of hint
that she’s thinking about hurting herself, severely hurting
herself? I did that a few days ago, and all I could think was “God,
what a fucking waste of time this is. I don’t care about you and your
stupid love life you fucking whore!” The entire time I’m sitting there
the whole conversation was her steady flow of self-absorbed whining.

So then I thought to myself, wow…. is that what I sound I like on here?

And I came to this conclusion. I don’t know who reads this. I don’t
fucking care. And I’m not making anyone sit here and listen to me. So
no, I’m not like her.

Plus, she moves really – painfully -
slow; like watching ketchup drip down the side of the bottle and it
won’t go any faster no matter how hard you shake it or bang on the
bottom. Complain, complain, complain….. and I’m thinking “If you hate
it here so much, what the fuck are you doing here?”

Because usually I can tolerate slow people who are sluggish cuz they’re
tired or ill. But if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s someone
LAZY.

Anyway, that’s my thought for this morning.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: Don’t fucking tell me how to do my fucking job
or I’ll remind you again why Great Men Love Me, I can be your boss in a
heartbeat, and I look damn fine wrapped in saran wrap and You are a
Complete Loser and that’s why you end up with other Complete Losers who
can’t spell, talk like an adult, or make any money.

This afternoon, I dreamed about eating french fries so delicious
that I actually woke up horny and had to masturbate so I could smoke a
cigarette…..

TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF – The Survey
Name:	Sarah  the Fish Nazi
Birthday:	June 24, 1900
Birthplace:	rhymes with vanilla
Current Location:	Santa Clara’s bellybutton
Eye Color:	Rich, dark chocolate
Hair Color:	Chocolate satin cake
Height:	5/3 – the perfect height
Right Handed or Left Handed:	Right handed masturbation
Your Heritage:	Twinkie
The Shoes You Wore Today:	Mom’s tennis shoes
Your Fears:	Falling from a great height.
Your Perfect Pizza:	Perponi. Extra perponies
Goal You Would Like To Achieve This Year:	Huh…. Quit smoking?
Your Most Overused Phrase On an instant messenger:	ROFL
Thoughts First Waking Up:	Coffee and cigarette NOW!
Your Best Physical Feature:	Breasts. Lips.
Your Bedtime:	Whenever.
Your Most Missed Memory:	innocence
Pepsi or Coke:	Coke
MacDonalds or Burger King:	Mcdonalds
Single or Group Dates:	Both with the right people.
Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea:	Lipton
Chocolate or Vanilla:	Vanilla. surprised?
Cappuccino or Coffee:	Coffee.
Do you Smoke:	Like a fucking chimney.
Do you Swear:	No
Do you Sing:	Yes. All the time.
Do you Shower Daily:	Yes
Have you Been in Love:	All sorts of Luuuuurve.
Do you want to go to College:	Did that.
Do you want to get Married:	Yes.
Do you belive in yourself:	Yes. To someone funny.
Do you get Motion Sickness:	Ohhh yeah.
Do you think you are Attractive:	If you like smart girls who like to laugh. At the same jokes because she forgot the punchline already.
Are you a Health Freak:	Hell no.
Do you get along with your Parents:	Sometimes
Do you like Thunderstorms:	Oh yeah…. good sex weather.
Do you play an Instrument:	Used to…..
In the past month have you Drank Alcohol:	No.
In the past month have you Smoked:	Yes.
In the past month have you been on Drugs:	Yes.
In the past month have you gone on a Date:	Yes. With Beau.
In the past month have you gone to a Mall:	No. I don’t think so…
In the past month have you eaten a box of Oreos:	How about a whole tray of cookies? Oreos are so  last year.
In the past month have you eaten Sushi:	Allergic to seafood.
In the past month have you been on Stage:	No, sadly.
In the past month have you been Dumped:	No.
In the past month have you gone Skinny Dipping:	I wish…
In the past month have you Stolen Anything:	Yes.
Ever been Drunk:	Yeah. Oh yeah. Lasted about 30 minutes.
Ever been called a Tease:	Yes.
Ever been Beaten up:	No.
Ever Shoplifted:	Yes.
How do you want to Die:	Lots of ways.
What do you want to be when you Grow Up:	Loved.
What country would you most like to Visit:	Louisiana
In a Boy/Girl..
Favourite Eye Color:	natural
Favourite Hair Color:	darkish
Short or Long Hair:	shortish
Height:	taller than me
Weight:	adequately fit
Best Clothing Style:	nice to touch.
Number of Drugs I have taken:	enough.
Number of CDs I own:	why?
Number of Piercings:	less than me.
Number of Tattoos:	as long as they mean something.
Number of things in my Past I Regret:	why regret?
CREATE YOUR OWN! – or – GET PAID TO TAKE SURVEYS!

honest to god, i think I’m the only one who posts anything worth
reading nowadays. Not that anyone actually reads this anymore. Except
maybe Mickey, but I can’t tell cuz he subbed and now I don’t actually
know if he’s visited this site cuz he doesn’t show up on the tracker
now. Do I care if anyone is reading this. LOL……..

Still, it’s just kinda sad that the overall quality of online blogs has
um…. how to put this diplomatically…. gone to shit. But then again,
the overall quality of entertainment has more or less gone to shit too.
Like the recent Hollywood excrement pouring into theaters nowadays.
People just ain’t trying anymore.

This begs the question: Can I do better?

Well, duh, Einstein. For fuck’s sake ….

I never read anyone’s blog anymore. Slice of life shit, IMO. Boring
lives, actually. Complaining about money and love and sex. Trying to
tease and tantalize by leaving details out. What the fuck are you doing
here then? You call this a blog? What are you trying to remember, your
last bowel movement?

Ah, I’m being too hard on humanity. I have – had - high expectations. I guess one can’t have the sublime without the mundane.

At least there’s talk of politics, history, war. People post current
events, satire, etc. So there’s still some glimmers of enlightenment.

I guess I miss going to high school.

Fresh-baked cookies for breakfast. Winter fatness is a good thing.

---

edit it[enter]
[enter]
[enter]
I wouldn’t say that starting smoking in high school is bad. I wouldn’t
at all. It’s an ice breaker. A comfort zone between two strangers.
“Do you have the keys to open the back door?”
Elena looks up from the box she’s cutting down and shakes her head. “Not the rolling ones.”
“How about the small ones?” Elena nods her head. “What are you sneaking out?” she asks under her breath.
“Nothing. Just wanna smokey.” – yeah, I call smoke breaks “smokey”.
She chuckles and walks with me to the defunct emergency exit. She opens it for me and I ask “Wanna cigarette?”
At first, she shakes her head no, but then holds out her hand.
“Sometimes I come out here to smoke a bowl.”
“You can work while you’re high?” and my voice ends in a high-pitched squeek of disbelief and awe.
“I’m high righ’ now….. Can’ you tell?”
And no, she looks normal to me. But then again, maybe she’s high every time I see her – all the time she’s at work.
I sit on the pavement in the blinding autumn sun. She squats down next
to me. Moments of inhaling and exhaling carbon monoxide and tar.
“Summun got capped a block from here,” she finally says.
“What?!?!” again that high-pitched squeek. “What?!?!?!” I ask again.
“Over the weekend. I heard the gun shots.”
“…… I don’t know what that sounds like.” I turn to face her. “What do gun shot sound like?”
“I heard a pop-pop. Then I heard a pop-pop-pop and I said to myself, summun jus’ got capped.”
Inhale……. exhale.
“So I tol’ my mom to watch my baby and I drove over thair an’ followed the sirens and shit but I di’nt see nuthin’.”
“There are no shootings in Sunnyvale!        are there?”
“Naw man, there’s always shit goin’ down but the folks here don’t
avertize it. They don’ go talkin’ bout it or nuthin. Th’other day I wuz
droppin’ off my daughter at Joey’s cousin’s house and they tole me
’bout these two kids gettin’ capped a block away from the high school.”
Inhale…… exhale.
“They wuz drivin’ down – and they shot out the back windshield and shot
the driver in the head. I guess he kept drivin’ cuz the car wen’ off
the road. They foun’ the driver, and they found the other guy around
the block with his head blown off.”
“You mean, they did that on purpose? They chased him down and ….. and chased him down and shot him on purpose?!?!?!”
“……. Shit like dat’s always goin’ down.”
Inhale….. exhale.
“Why? I don’t get it. Why?”
She’s quiet for a moment, thinking and smoking, then “Gangs. Girls. Wearin’ the wrong colors.”
“Colors? There are no gangs in Sunnyvale!”
“Blue and Red.”
“You mean, like in L/A/?” I’d always thought of gangs as something foreign, something Away.
“Kinda. There mosl’y from Salinas, O’ange County. Then they come up
here and they think s’all intense like it is down south but they don’
know,” she shakes her head “they don’ know tha’ the guys up here are
Old Cats that don’ fuck aroun’. They’re all like ‘You wanna come up all
in here and start shi’?'”
“And then they kill them? They …cap them?”
“Yeah, the Old Cats don’t fuck aroun’. But those foo’s got capped cuz of a girl.”

New Weblog Entry [Enter]
[Enter]
[Enter]
Sometimes when I’m smoking I wish I was smoking. But you know what the
most ironic thing in the world is? I was the one, a long, loooong time
ago, who convinced my dad to stop smoking. He smoked a lot, like -
what’s that phrase? – like a fucking chimney. And that’s before I
understood what a chimney was. But yeah, I convinced him to stop
smoking. At school, when I still believed everything I learned in that
little plastic chair molded to little kiddie butts and the world’s
secrets were being revealed by my teacher, I learned that smoking was
bad. No, wait      Smoking Is Bad. That’s how
everyone said it anyway – with capitals.
So I used to take the No Smoking stickers being passed around campus
and slap them onto any surface in the house. On the bathroom door under
the postcard of a baby penguin. On the kitchen wall between the big
wooden “fork n’ spoon” ubiquitous in Philipino households. I cut out
pictures of blackened lungs and cancer-encrusted throats and left them
like Watchtowers on the coffee table, the kitchen table.
And boy did I rant and rail about the imminent, horrible dangers of smoking: bad breath, yellowed teeth, premature aging.
And slowly but surely, my dad got the hint that I might want him to
stop that slow suicide and maybe be around a while longer. He quit
smoking.
But yeah, sometimes when I’ve already got a cigarette between my lips
and I inhale that hot menthol, I wish I wish I wish I was smoking.
And it seems like evryone starts smoking in High School. When they’re
teenagers ruled – no, overwhelmed – by a tempest of hormones. I think
if I’d had sex in high school, I wouldn’t have started smoking. It must
have been all that sexual tension….. yeah, that’s it. And it’s not
natural. No, smoking is learned. It’s emulating something – someone -
we want to be. 
So I lit up my first fag in Europe.
Legal drinking when I was sixteen, among suave and world-weary Belgian
teens, sitting on the patio of a pub, and someone offers me a
cigarette. What the heck, I think. Couldn’t hurt. So I smoked one and a
few minutes later, I’m barfing all over the walls of the pub’s tiny
basement bathroom.
Banging on the door.
“Eve, let me in.”
I gag. I heave.
“Eve, open the door or I’ll break it down!” Chris yells.
“I’m fine,” I try to say, but it comes out like a kitten’s whimper.
“I’m going to count to 10. If you don’t open the door, I’m breaking it
down.” And he will, too. He’s the quarterback of our football team,
tall and thick like a redwood, my best friend’s boyfriend who had
promised her he’d take care of me on this trip.
“Hold on……. hold on…….” I crawl to the door, open it, and
collapse into his arms. He drags me outside and I’m too weak and dizzy
to be embarrassed.

Version 3.3 release date: 04/11/85

“It’s not about love,” I say as I fold another towel. “It’s not about power. … It’s about…. control.”
Jason glances at me as he pulls more tattered towels out of the dryer. “Sometime you scare me.”
I chuckle. “That’s all that relationships are. Control over someone
else. I mean, isn’t that the ultimate motivation in the human ego?”
“I thought it was reproduction.”
I shoot him a disapproving glance for interrupting. “I guess power plays a part in it, but ultimately…. it’s about control.”
I start another tower of towels.
“Is that why you work at this pet store?” he asks.
“Yeah. Animals are so…. simple. Their relationships are uncomplicated. Their existence … eat, sleep, shit.”
“And you have control over them.”
“Yes, and you have control over them. Hold a hamster in your hand and
you decide whether it reproduces and passes on its genes or it could be
a scrumptious snack for a boa.”
“Sometimes you scare me,” he repeats.
“Now my sister,” I continue, bringing the topic back to why I dragged
him into the store basement for towel duty. “She doesn’t have any
control. That’s why she’s in all these relationships that break
down…. disintegrate… I think she has to learn to control herself
first before she can be in a serious relationship.”
“Give her some credit. She made it out of this shithole, didn’t she?”
“Being older and having a drivers license doesn’t automatically make one more mature.”

My older sister. Even though everyone calls her Baby, I’ll always think
of her as my older sister. I think she was born with an old soul.
Tired, weary of life. But a young heart – capricious, impulsive.
“You have to take your goddamned citizenship test!” I had yelled into the phone that afternoon.
“I’ve waited eleven years. What’s a few more months.”
“It’ll take a few months just to process your application! Look, just
stop by the house and pick up the packet ok? Pappy told me to call you
and tell you that.”
“Why didn’t he just call himself?”
“Because you never pick up the phone.”
“Oh yeah….. I guess I’ll try and stop by sometime this week.”
“No. Not good enough. You need to give me a definate time. Tonight. You’re not doing anything tonight.”
“How do you know that? I could be …. plotting something or something….”
“Because you never do anything. You never leave your apartment.”
“….”
I sigh into phone, starting a dozen sentences in my head but
discounting them just as quickly. Finally I say “Why don’t you just
move back home?”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“But you could save so much money if you don’t have to pay the rent.
You could…. pay off your credit cards, make your car payments. Hell,
go to Disneyland for all I care!”
“That’s not a good idea,” she said again, with more conviction and force than was necessary to convince me.
“I’m going back to school in a few weeks. Can we do something together? Have dinner or something?”
“Yeah, that sounds nice,” she replies in a vague way that I know means
“I’m saying what you want to hear so you’ll leave me alone.”
I say goodbye, hang up, and slip the phone into my bookbag. I glance in
the mirror on the way out the door. My reflection throws back a
reminder that I’m nothing like my sister.

Having finished folding the dog wash towels, I make my way back to the
aquatics department of the pet store. I still have a few hours before
the after-work rush of the weekday and the handsome men in business
suits come to buy their fish.
As I’m dragging the hose down the aisle,

Borders On The Ridiculous

Prologue

There are many ways to commit suicide. Some are more eloquent than
others, I suppose. And I guess it could mean many things, depending on
where you gre up and all that. You know, like it could be noble and
shit. Die for your country…. But I don’t think that’s really suicide
then – I mean, it’s supposed to be for teenagers with emotional
problems getting rejected when they ask a date out for prom. Or
veterans that relive war in their heads until the only thing that can
make the screams stop is a revolver. At least, that’s what the movies
make it seem like….
But this isn’t a story about kamikazes or wars. This is a story about my sister.

Version 1.3: release date 11/11/83

I made the duck embryo dance on my tongue.
“Ewwww! Stop it!” Eve laughs. Her pudgy toddler hands slap at my face,
but it’s good to hear her laugh and I chew the delicacy and grab
another egg.
Distracted by a line of chicks that scurry across the dirt, Eve gets up
from the porch steps and runs after them. I push myself up also, trying
to keep her in my line of sight but the nanny’s daughter opens the
screen door.
“Your yayay wants you,” she sullenly says, and disappears into the house.
Walking over the threshold into the coolness of my grandmother’s
parlor, I smell it. Verbena, roses, sage. The witch doctor is here, and
I turn to sneak to the chicken coop but yayay’s stern voice stops me.
“Come say hello to your Aunty.” And I press the back of Aunty’s hand to
my forehead, aware of the dust dissolving with sweat on my skin,
feeling like a pagan at the feet of these wrinkled, white-haired,
ageless women.
Aunty says something in Tagalog and yayay laughs. I sit down on the
stone floor and wait for whatever candy she’s going to give me. But
Aunty looks at me with her tiny eyes made huge and bulbous by thick
glasses. And when she starts to talk, she keeps looking at me, but
she’s telling my grandmother my illness.
“You are surrounded by spirits,” Aunty says. “And they protect you.
That is why you get hit by a truck and live with only a scar on your
knee.”
I scratch absent-mindedly at the long scar.
“You will be protected your entire life. You are dear to them.” And
then she pauses and takes a sip of water. She glances at yayay, fans
herself, then looks at me again.
“But your sister…. she is weaker than you. But stronger. You need to
take care of her because …. ” and here she breaks off, says something
in Tagalog and I shake my head, not understanding.
“While she is young,” Aunty continues. “Evelyn will be easy to watch.
She adores you now and minds you, but when she’s older…. You can’t
protect her when she’s older…. God gave you and your sister special
gifts, and some spirits are jealous of that.”
I listen with all the gravity of a ten-year-old. Meaning to say, I
listen, but keep my eyes on the brown paper sack on her lap, waiting
for candy.
Her wrinkled hand of brown spots and gold rings reaches into the bag
and pulls out sweets wrapped in a jubilee of paper. I take them and put
them in my pocket and run out the front door to find Eve and give her
some.

I found her in the chicken coop rubbing chicks on her face.
“I fed them!” she exclaims when she sees me. But then I hear it – a
silence that’s foreign in this wooden cave. I look around and all the
chickens are still, the only movement is their feathers ruffling in the
breeze. I look at Eve again and ask “What did you feed them?”
She points at the bag of sand we use to prop the coop door open.

You know that moment in movies when the main character realizes
something and his eyes get all huge and he backs away real slowly and
the music starts to sound kinda suspenseful? It took me years to
realize that this was that moment, staring at my sister with her baby
fat, the sunlight glaring off the yellow chicks in her hand and at her
feet, completely oblivious, surrounded by death.

We spent our early childhood in the humid jungles of our grandparents’
farms, in the polluted wilderness of Manilla and motorcycles,
surrounded by cousins who all called her Baby Eve. And our parents,
strangers who visited a few months a year, lived and worked in
different countries, traveling engineers going where the government
sent them. We saw them as foreigners, really, coming into our house
with the cold fogs of London or the yellow dust of Nigeria always
creating a barrier of distrust and abandonment.
There are pictures of me celebrating birthdays with my cousins and the
neighborhood kids, playing tag and chasing the dogs that roamed our
farm. And there are pictures of Eve sitting on the stone floor of the
kitchen, her legs black with soot and her fingers grabbing hold of her
dirty toes, looking at the photographer (Mama? Yayay?) with an
expression of guileless joy. But this picture that someone framed and
put on the coffee table was taken the day we arrived at San Francisco
International to live with our parents – illegal aliens for years to
come but still faithful to the belated ideal of the American Dream.

“There are so many white people,” Eve had said as she held my hand. A
couple walked towards us, the woman bent down and hugged Eve. This was
mammy. She had an anxious happiness to her gestures, a frazzled
frenetic static that made Eve jumpy and she squeezed my hand. It’s too
late, I wanted to say to mammy – she’ll never love you like she loves us;  me, yayay, and yoyoy.

She didn’t talk for a long time. I think she didn’t understand why we
had to leave Nabua to live in San Jose in a neighborhood where
neighbors didn’t know each other and the doors were locked during the
daytime. She didn’t understand, for the longest time, why she couldn’t
play beyond the boundary of grass, why her kingdom had been reduced to
a small cement enclosure, why there were no animals.

When the new baby came along, we moved again.

---

He denied it a thousand times and a thousand-and-one times might have
done the trick, but he stopped at a thousand. Because living was cruel
and unnecessary torment, but still she followed him like a shadow,
haunted him like a mute muse.

Opening the car door and sliding into the driver’s seat of his truck,
he could still smell her perfume, that one perfume she always wore
when, running down the stairs of her office she’d laugh that careless
laugh and love him more than anyone had ever loved in the history of
war.

Close your eyes, her scent seemed to say. Close your eyes and just let it all melt away.

Scarlett’s dad passed away the day before yesterday.

I could say it was a relief for her, since he’d been sick with cancer
for so long. At least, it seemed like a long time when you don’t sleep
anymore, hearing him throw up because of everything that cancer does to
you. And I could say it was a relief for her because he’d been so
cruel, saying things like “You’ll never amount to anything.” and making
her feel less than a daughter.

But what I’ll say is that she’s a good person, and every relationship has three parts;  A beginning, a middle, and an end.

It’s funny how quickly the seasons change when you don’t spend a lot of time outdoors.

Like, just last week, it was warm and the sun forced through my open
blinds with cleavers of blinding yellow. And today, the Outside presses
in shyly, cool and grey against the window, bathes my wall with an
absent-minded white.

If you’re wondering what it is, it’s that this time of year reminds me
of being in the brick-walled courtyard of the psych ward. It’s like a
country club, really. I think I’m longing for it – for the unexpecting
solitude of just existing. For the force-feeding of vitamin-infused
mashed potatoes.  For the … mindlessness of art and the
senselessnes of breathing.

When things are overwhelming…..

When things are overwhelming, I find myself shutting down like an
abandoned factory. All the workers leave, the stragglers kicking at the
dust with their worn-out toes. The last person looks back, makes sure
all the lights are off, the machinery grinding to a halt, the
chain-link fence rolled into place and a padlock clicks and then
darkness.

And I sit here, hollow    
immobile         
unproductive            
insentient.

Sometimes,

                            
sometimes it’s like that……

But still, however unwillingly, the blueprints and plans lay open on a
desk somewhere in the gloom of offices with spiders building cobwebs
over the thresholds and through the hallways. Still, there is potential
being buried under a calming dust undisturbed by the storms outside.

It is a feeling of being abandoned. Of being locked inside. And yet, it is the feeling of being safe.

That is the most dangerous safety.